Blanket bonanza

This Wednesday, I made 22 baby blankets and then two more on Thursday. I didn't MEAN to make that many--I just had this ginormous flannel stash for baby blankets, and my serger was finally working, and I had three or four babies to make blankets for.....

Anyway, now my baby gift stash is replenished. These are just simple, single layer blankets that are serged around the edge, so all I had to do was square up the fabric, do a little cutting and then finish the edges.

All the girl blankets

All the boy blankets

These are made of stretchy knit. They are really great for a lightweight swaddle that stays snug.

Flannel boy

 

 Flannel girl

 Cotton/microplush

 Microplush is a beast to work with, because it's slippery and stretchy. On the right, I did the traditional method where you sew right sides together, turn it inside out and topstitch. On the left, I left the wrong sides together and just serged all the way around. I think it actually turned out better that way and looks neater.

These blankets are on reserve for my sister Maria, who is due in a few weeks with a baby girl.

 And these were for Monica's beautiful baby girl, who was born yesterday!

 Isabelle and I brought the blankets and some roses down to meet her last night.

 ♥Emma Rose♥

 She is so precious and we are thrilled that she's here!

New jewelry listings

In two weeks, we are all flying to North Carolina for a family reunion. I've had several massive to-do lists to work on, and "make jewelry" was not on any of them. But I'd bought some beads recently (it's a habit) and once I sat down to make something with them, one thing led to another, and I ended up making 5 adult bracelets, 8 pairs of earrings, a pendant and 14 baby bracelets!

So here they are on my etsy shop, you can click on the links if you want.

Alana baby bracelet

Made with natural white shell beads.

 

 Rosa baby bracelet

Made with white and rose quartz beads.

Mei baby bracelet

Made with Czech beads and Swarovski crystals.

Annalise baby bracelet

Restock-- a tiny bit different than the original. Made with Czech beads and Swarovski crystals.

Lark baby bracelet

Made with turquoise glass beads and copper.

Sierra earrings

Made with turquoise glass, copper and aqua magnesite beads. I actually already sold these to a lady in Sweden.

Sonnet earrings

Sonnet pendant

Sonnet bracelet

Made with rose quartz and silver plated findings.

Lia baby bracelet

Restock of my minimalist silver plated baby bracelet.

 

Indian Elephant earrings

Restock of my most popular earrings. I get the charms from England and have sold 18 pairs so far! (Most things in my shop, there's only ever one available. Not so with these.)

Andalucía bracelet

Made with turquoise dyed howlite nuggets.

Now on to my next project!

Maria and Monica's baby shower

 

My sister Maria and my sister-in-law Monica are both having baby girls next month! We are so excited. It is the third child for each, but we still wanted to have a little baby shower with immediate family. So my mom and I held one at her house a few weeks ago.

I ordered the invites and she hand made all the cute decorations. She is super talented--if you're wondering where my craftiness came from.

There was me, my mom Carolyn, our sister-in-law Lori, Maria, Monica, her mom Roxy and grandma Lucy, friend Brenda, Maria's mother and sister-in-law Dawna and Josie, her Grandma (in-law) Audrey, and our aunt Sherri. We just wish our sister Meg was there!

It was pretty low-key, we mostly just ate and talked.

I made chicken salad sandwiches (just used canned chicken and added celery, apple, red onion, mayo, mustard, craisins, etc. Next time I'll add feta cheese.) and the cupcakes were this vanilla cupcake recipe and this lemon cheesecake mousse on top. 

The cupcakes though!

I rather stupidly decided to try a new recipe from scratch the day before the shower, and this is what happened! So I went back to the store to buy more ingredients, tried lowering the oven temp and some other things and the second batch turned out like this, too! It was almost comical.

See the mini round cake in the middle, between the two cupcake pans? That I saved for Isabelle's "smash cake" on her first birthday. It is so pathetic looking, hahahahahahaha

The problem with the recipe is that it has three different leavening agents, (creaming the butter, plus baking soda and baking powder) and we live over a mile high in elevation and so even though I only filled the cups halfway, the batter rose a huge amount and then collapsed. The flavor was really good, just know that they might not turn out pretty.

 Anyway....

 

 My mom had us fill out papers with our hopes for the babies as they grow up, and then the girls opened gifts. There was quite a decent haul!

 

I gave them baskets with all my favorite baby things and some sister bracelets.

 After gifts, we sewed some burp cloths from cute flannel and cloth diapers (cut in half) for the back. They will be awesome, I wish I'd made some for me a year ago.

 

When it was over, the husbands came back over with our kids. It was fun to see so much family. Now I just can't wait to meet those BABIES!!

December projects

Every December starts out innocently enough. But soon, something like this happens:

 

 Child brings home paper from school announcing a "trading post" that they need to bring items for. Homemade items, not costing any money, preferably! So I pull out my popsicle sticks, buttons and glue, and next thing you know, we've made about 45 snowflake ornaments. (We first made these for Madelyn's 4th birthday and they cover our Christmas tree and I love them.)

Then, my niece Emery's birthday is December 3rd, and she had worn out the bracelets that I made for her when she was a baby. So I thought I'd make her a new batch:

She loves Frozen, and I made the bracelet on the far right in Frozen colors. That got me to thinking......

Make ALL the Frozen themed baby/toddler/girl bracelets!!!

 

So I did that, plus restocked some of my most popular designs...

 

And then I made even more stuff, because December is my busiest selling time for my etsy shop.

 

 Then, everyone at Mark's work needed treats.

 

 

Then a bunch more people needed treats. (I think there were 83 on the list this year...oy) I made mint brownies, homemade turtles and caramels, toffee, and everybody else got a store bought cookie or muffin mix with a new rubber spatula.

 

In the meantime, I was attempting to make 8 "I Spy" Bags without the kids seeing what I was doing. Ha!! This project dragged on forever. It was very hard to find time to sew when they weren't home, and since my sewing machine is just on the kitchen table....Madelyn guessed what I was up to.

I didn't really know what I was doing, but they turned out pretty cute. A lot more work than I thought, though!

The top three were Madelyn, Luke and Isabelle's; the left bottom went to Hattie, Jack and Gary, and the right bottom to Nathan and Ava, my nieces and nephews.

The kicker came when I decided that we MUST have new stockings for Christmas, because ours were never coordinating (which bugged me) and Isabelle didn't have one yet. I even took all three kids to Jo-Ann by myself so that they could pick out the fabric they wanted, which took an hour and a half and more patience than I really had. I had never made fully lined, big stockings before (I've made tons of mini ones) but of course that did not deter me! Oh no!! I will not be deterred.

So then what happened was that Christmas Eve dawned and I still had not made them yet.

l-r: mine, Isabelle's, Tiger's, Madelyn's, Mark's and Luke's

As you can see, they did get finished, but not until 10:44 pm on Christmas Eve.

Somehow, I figured out how to sandwich some Warm & Natural batting in there and adapted two different patterns I found online to make the fold over cuff method work, instead of doing a detachable cuff.

 

They turned out very cute!

So.....add to that all the normal Christmas shopping and mailing and craziness, throw in a birthday and an anniversary and two 4th grade book reports and a teething baby and that is why I was quite done in come the end of 2014.